Largest European Bioinformatics Center Selects Mellanox InfiniBand

Today Mellanox announced that the Center for Biological and Sequence Analysis (CBS) at the Risø Campus of Denmark Technical University (DTU) has selected Mellanox’s end-to-end FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand solution for the center’s new supercomputer, making Denmark a global leader in bioinformatics. Mellanox’s InfiniBand interconnect solution delivers the scalability, high performance and bandwidth needed for researchers around the world to share information and collaborate on the molecular analysis of people and their diseases to discover patterns and determine treatment methods.

This supercomputer was built specifically to work with very complex DNA, patient and lifestyle data – making it the only of its kind and positioning Denmark as a world leader in life science and pharmaceutical research,” said Peter Løngreen, Deputy Director, Department of Systems Biology. “The Mellanox FDR InfiniBand solution provided us the most bandwidth, greatest scalability potential and highest performance benchmarking to date. This enables our researchers to access and share data faster than ever before on a system that is optimized to process rapidly growing and diverse volumes of data.”

DTU’s supercomputer can store over 7.5 petabytes of data and has 92 terabytes of extremely fast memory over 560 servers, making it among the 125 largest computers in the world today. Mellanox’s FDR InfiniBand solution enables researchers on the DTU campus, as well as an estimated 500 users from around the world to take advantage of the enormous processing power offered by the supercomputer, aiding in the effort to make advances in life sciences. Among these users will be those participating in the European research infrastructure ELIXIR, which Denmark joined last spring. ELIXIR is an infrastructure that connects many of Europe’s independent bioinformatics resources to form a high-performance computing network, making it possible to utilize and analyze shared data in new and larger contexts. By choosing Mellanox, DTU’s supercomputer is now equipped with the most efficient interconnect technology and researchers will be able to easily expand their efforts when needed at an affordable rate while maintaining unparalleled bandwidth and low latency, which ensures better performance and improved storage capabilities.

DTU was initially attracted to Mellanox because of the scalability and value our solutions offer, but it was the low latency coupled with unparalleled bandwidth abilities that made us the primary choice for the University’s new supercomputer,” said Gilad Shainer, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “High-performance computing plays a key role in industrial biotechnology and pharmaceutical research, and Mellanox’s FDR InfiniBand ensures researchers are able to collaborate and share the data critical to developing lifesaving treatments.”

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